Seagate Anaplan Review

Overall Satisfaction with Anaplan

The corp FP&A team is using it for financial budgets. The revenue planning team is using it for revenue planning. One of our units is using it for demand planning. The customer service org is using it for returns modeling. It's primarily a finance footprint but that footprint is growing outside finance.

The actions could be improved - make it obvious what the sources and targets of the are so we don't have to guess or put them in the action names. Also get a native scheduler! That's so simple and it's very frustrating and expensive to have to build/buy our own.

Reporting and UI still have a long way to go. Simple things like being able to alphabetize/order what you see on the screen, or add a rich color pallet to choose from.

User access management could improve. We need to have model level admins that don't have access to everything in the workspace. Also the tenant admin space doesn't work effectively. I can't remove a user from all models simultaneously. I also can't see all models a user has access to from the tenant admin space.

We've been able to reduce our spending on planning software and support. We've also been able to integrate monthly outlooks into our planning process rather than only being able to do quarterly budgets while doing the monthly outlooks in excel. Our planning process has become more flexible and we're able to see impacts of changes to the plan more quickly.

Anaplan requires less IT support and its calculation engine is far more powerful. Anaplan is also less expensive when total cost of ownership is considered. We also liked that you're able to use Anaplan for a variety of business planning functions rather than having a bespoke tool for budgets or commissions or demand planning etc.

We want to have enterprise wide integrated business planning. We want to dramatically reduce the planning cycle times across the business and have the ability to see how the business is shaping up on a much more frequent basis so that we can anticipate problems and address them rather than be reactive.

It's great for complex models that require frequent updates and instant feedback. That describes most planning situations I know of. It's great for organizations that want to change plans and models independent of IT support or programming. It's not a great reporting or analytics tool. Ad-hoc analysis is a non-starter in the platform--you have to be a model builder and the process of generating a report is very cumbersome compared with something like Tableau.